Assessment (part 2)

Hi again!!

This post will be dedicated to the second short story I’ve chosen for my course assignment. It is “Jack and the Beanstalk”, a fairy tale that you can find in the collection English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel; the same anthology I used for the other short story that I presented, “Tattercoats”.

In this case, I’m going to present some actual and post-teaching activities in which I will focus mainly on reading comprehension, vocabulary and storytelling. The story is intended to 4^th of ESO students and in order to carry out the activities, they will have to split into groups of 4 people. 

In contrast to the work carried out in the other short story proposed, in which I promoted collaborative learning, now students will be asked to work cooperatively so they will be a part of a team in which each member has a specific role to fulfill, a specific task that will be an essential part of the whole task in the end. The purpose of it is to promote responsibility and autonomous learning, so they will increase personal skills together with linguistic skills. Digital skills will be also encouraged by the use of digital tools as learning strategies. Other strategies used are searching for information, and differentiation between main ideas and details.

As a final point, they will have to create a blog with Kidblog. I have already introduced you this tool in another post; it allows students to publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community, and the most important, teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts, so I find this alternative very useful to encourage writing and autonomous skills.

Actual Activities

1. Find words or expressions in the story to show that these sentences are false. Each member will answer two of the statements and then they will put all the work together.

- Jack’s father was a very strong man

- Milky-white the cow always gave loads of milk

- The queer little old man wanted to exchange Jack’s cow for 5 common lentils

- Jack’s mother threw all the queer man gave to him out of the window

- Jack went up to the sky with a ladder

- The ogre’s wife didn’t give Jack anything for breakfast

- Jack took the ogre’s hen and it laid a very beautiful egg

- The orgre catched Jack when he was escaping with his magic harp

2. As you have been looking for the answers of number 1, you should have looked up for new words on the dictionary. Now, each member will provide his/her words, together with the words that you think are important to understand the story, and with all the bunch of words, you will create a single word cloud.

3. With the use of a digital tool called Character Scrapbook, you will have to analyse all the characters of the story. There are 4 characters, so each team member will have one character to evaluate. You will have to follow the indications provided in order to complete the different section:

- Ten things I know about the character

- Ten words that describe him/her

- Ten details about his/her appearance

- Ten facts about his/her personality

- Ten challenges he/she faced

- Ten accomplishments he/she achieved.

Once you complete your scrapbook, you can print (in pdf) each character’s description and put all the work together, so you will get a Jack and the Beanstalk characters' Scrapbook with all the characters of the book analysed.

Post-Activities

    1. As an extension activity, you will have to think the 4 most important scenes of the story through which the whole plot would be understood (the first scene is the exchange of belongings between the queer old man and Jack, and the other 3 important scenes take place in the ogre’s white house).  
    When you have decided the scenes, each member of the team will have to represent one of those scenes by using the Kerproof digital tool. You can represent them by making a movie or telling a story, that's your choice. But, the important thing is that when all the scenes are created, another person has to be able to watch or read them in order and understand the story without more details.

   2. The final activity will be the creation of a personal blog using Kidblog, in which, individually, you will have to tell all the activities you have completed by working on “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale, together with your reflections and feedback. 

      So, this is it!!! Hope you enjoyed with my activities!! see you soon!!



Resources

- Word cloud creator: http://www.wordle.net/
- Making a movie or telling a story: http://www.kerpoof.com/
- Blog: http://kidblog.org/home/

We continue with... Session 2 (part 2)

Hi there!!

This post will be dedicated to the second part of session 2 in which we carried out the activities from Station 3.

Station 3

This station was fully devoted to “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”. We were provided with different activity proposals which had to be divided into pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching activities. In order to take our decision, we bore in mind whether the questions demanded information from the actual reading or they could be carried out without a reading, so based on that, we considered, for example, the discussion about the author, Roald Dahl, and the think pair-share to be at the beginning so as to set the story in a context and relate it to other author’s works; or the exercise to find words and expressions to be in the actual teaching since it demanded a concrete reading comprehension.

After that, there was a more practical activity in which we had to represent a scene of our choice using some digital tools in which comics can be created. It was quite exciting for us at the beginning but as we looked into the provided webpages we let down. They were Goanimate and Bitstrips, both with very limited use unless you pay for it, so we found this fact so harmful for our students, since we don’t want them to spend money or have them in front of something that incites to do it. 

In addition, we considered that both pages were not so flexible because they would imply to create a new account out of our personal account, and that means again an inconvenient for our students’ use of digital tools, going against their personal privacy. However, I tried to do a comic scene with the limited uses that Goanimate offers without charge, just for you to see an example; for this, I chose the part of the story at the end when Mr. Bixby and his wife are in the dentist and he wants to uncover her from her lie about the pawnbroker ticket she supposedly found by chance: “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’scoat” comic scene.

Regarding to this comic scene, we were also asked to consider the possibility to post it in an educational webpage called Kidblog; my teamwork didn’t consider this option because as we decided not to create the comic, we skipped question 3, but I’ve done it by my own and I find this webpage very interesting. With Kidblog students can publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community, and that is because teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts. I also like it because it is not necessary to create a new account, you can access it as a google user, so this is very functional. I have created a teacher’s blog were students can follow me and participate on discussions, and I have posted on it “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” comic scene. You can see my Kidblog’s page here.

Finally, we had to create a word cloud image using Woodle and consider if we would use it in class. Everyone in my team considered this tool very beneficial and witty to use it either in pre-teaching or in post-teaching. It can be used to provide the context of an activity, as a brainstorm to learn new vocabulary or to highlight the most important words found in a text and summarize it as well. So, here you have our word-cloud, thought to sum up “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat” short story using key words that can provide meaningful information about the story. 

Cooperative teamwork final conclusion

As a final thought about the work we performed as a cooperative team, I would say that it is necessary a great implication from all the members of the team so as to achieve the intended goal, in our case, the fulfillment of the 3 station activities. We started quite motivated, each member assuming his/her role as an important element of the group, but as the time went by some members had to assume the role of others because they were not so much integrated. Anyway, it has been a great experience for me, I have learnt another way to work in contrast to the traditional way, with the use of active learning, cooperative and collaborative learning and digital tools. They make students to help each other, socialize and get responsibilities so, in my opinion, active learning provides very important sources of motivation, social-affective relationships and personal knowledge. For all these reasons, I will keep on studying about these methods and strategies for sure. 

This has been all for now, see you soon with more active tasks to perform!!!! 

TO BEGIN WITH... Session 1

Hi everyone, 

As I said to you before, I'll be publishing all the activities and resources we have been seeing since we began this course 2 months ago.

I'll also propose some reflections and feedback about them, and after that I'll suggest some others to develop in English as a Foreign Language teaching.

These activities are part of a subject I'm attending as part of a master's degree to become a Secondary English teacher, and the name of the course is "Recursos didácticos para la enseñanza de la lengua y la literatura".

Our lecturer is Laura Angelini Doffo, she's a very outgoing and active person, so that makes reference to the way she performs her classes, very lively and enjoyable.

To begin with, I'll start with the description of all the activities we carried out in the first  day of class.

Session 1 

This session could be divided into 2 parts:

The first part was kind of an introductory lesson in which our lecturer started by explaining the way she was going to assess us. After that she did a short explanation about what active learning is, since this method was the one she was going to carry out during the most part of the lessons. 

This methodology implies active teaching, so the teacher must plan and create activities all the time in order to make her students work on everything intended to be learnt by them. I find this fact very important, students need to practise and be in direct contact with the object of learning, so in this way they will be able to acquire it. However, this could be certainly applied to any field of learning, as it is proved that when something catches your attention and feelings is when you learn and gather it.

We also talked about the ICT's as a resource for English classes; we considered the variety of techs and resources in an English class as an essential way to engage students and call their attention through the 5 senses. I definitely agree with a variety of resources in a language class but also think that technology must be one of the most important strategies employed by the teacher. It is a fact that technology is part of the life of our secondary students, they have grown up with it so they are perfect users; because of that, they have changed their way to acquire a language, their learning styles are different, they are more visual, intuitive-random and multi-tasking. Therefore, we as teachers must adapt our teaching strategies so as to fit our students’ needs.

Then, the lecturer did a distinction between groupwork and teamwork. The first one is used when we are talking about collaborative learning, that is, when students are set into different groups where they will carry out an activity or task that will be solved with the aid of everyone. All of them have the same importance and through a discussion or debate, they will find the solution. In contrast, teamwork is used with cooperative learning and it implies different roles within a team; each student has a different responsibility so at the end all parts need to be performed in order to complete the task. This explanation was used for introducing the second part of the session.

In the second part, the lecturer explained the active learning activity we were going to complete. It would consist of a task divided into 3 stations. The 3 stations were built around 2 short stories we had to read (“Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”, both by Roald Dahl), so all the activities were related to them. We were distributed into different teams, so the task would be performed by the use of the cooperative method. Each member of the team had a different role, which were the leader, the language supervisor, the secretary and the advisor. Groups were presumably of 4 people, but if more, some of the roles could be repeated; it was the case of my group, so we had 2 secretaries. We were Group 1 and the members of my group were:

- Eliseo Martínez, the leader

- Phil Lee, the advisor

- Sara Gozálvez, the language supervisor

- Irene Montalar and I, the secretaries

Furthermore, all the work done throughout the 3 stations was shared in a digital platform called Edmodo and in this way we could also see and comment our classmates’ work.

Station 1

In this section we had to deal with some questions related to both short stories, “Lamb to the slaughter” and “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s coat”.

We had no problems answering the questions, almost everyone participated in the decisions and we carried out our roles fairly.  The questions 2 and 3 dealt directly with information related to the stories and I found them quite appealing because, with the first one, we related both female protagonists, making us to think about their personalities and their behaviours, so we were able to go beyond the actual events; with the second one, we thought about the ironic symbols and what they symbolize in each story.

What’s more, we could learn to use some digital tools as Edmodo which is a very useful tool to share and comment our work with the rest of the teams and to see our classmates' work and learn from them, or soundcloud and vacaroo tools to record voice online. I have to say that we had some problems when using the voice-recorder tools, but we could fix them by using another alternative to record the voice, so here you have the audio in which one of our team members pretended to be Mrs Malony, excusing herself of the attempted murder. 

On the other hand, we were asked to consider when these tools would be used in a better way throughout the teaching process, that is, in pre-teaching, actual teaching or post-teaching, and I personally found these questions useful since we, as a group, could comment and discuss why use them in the first place or in another.

So, this is the explanation of Station 1, see you soon on the STATION 2!!!